March 21, 2025
New Poll on Workers’ Attitudes to AI Reinforces Old Divides
Will artificial intelligence help, replace, or kill us? These long-unanswered questions came back into focus earlier this week, as the Pew Research Center published the results of an eye-opening poll that further underscores an unhappy trend: our debate about AI is fundamentally broken. Pew found that more than half of all American workers reported being…
March 20, 2025
Regional Transmission Organizations as Market Platforms V
In this RTO series, I’ve been exploring the decision-making processes and corporate governance structures within Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs), highlighting how these institutions perpetuate the control and decision-making power of incumbent investor-owned utilities (IOUs). Today, we’ll delve deeper by examining two critical, complementary insights: first, how monopoly regulation dilutes corporate governance incentives for IOUs, and…
March 20, 2025
Is Single Extreme Event Attribution Even Possible?
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) currently has a study committee on Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and their Impacts. In this series — Weather Attribution Alchemy — I have previously discussed the committee’s many conflicts of interest. Today I discuss a crucial scientific question at the center of the committee’s work,…
March 20, 2025
DOGE, Open Up the MAX Database!
My most recent post “Haste Controls Waste!” sought to reconcile my misgivings about the speed of current government reforms with decades of staunch and thoroughgoing resistance. Now let’s talk about DOGE-y reforms that could be applied to democratic processes. When Elon Musk spoke about democracy in the Oval Office some weeks ago, many people focused…
March 19, 2025
How much might AI legislation cost in the US?
Policymakers are rushing to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), but the economic impact of these regulations remains largely unexplored. While the European Union and the United Kingdom have produced cost estimates, recent developments in the United States offer important new benchmarks. Recent amendments to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and regulations implementing President Biden’s Executive Order on AI offer…
March 18, 2025
The Sad Myth of Independent Agencies
President Trump’s recent executive order (EO) asserting more formal control over so-called independent agencies has sparked controversy. Critics decry it as a “fundamental reshaping of the federal government” and even “illegal,” fearing that it will allow the president to direct regulatory decisions. But while the EO may look dramatic, in practice it changes little. Independent…
March 18, 2025
Children’s Online Safety Should Rely on Content Providers, Not Device Manufacturers
Creating and managing a positive digital environment for children has become a priority for parents, lawmakers, and technology companies. However, as proposals progress to develop solutions and implement protections, we must ensure that our approaches address parents’ concerns without creating additional issues from the extensive collection of minors’ data. Several legislative proposals currently seek to…
March 18, 2025
How the Founders Addressed Facial Recognition Technology
If you study Fourth Amendment law and jurisprudential trends, you can—at least in a figurative, tentative, hopeful, and possibly illusory sense—see the future. Subject to all those caveats, I have good news about difficult problems in Fourth Amendment law such as facial recognition and DNA. Curiously, my first writing on the topic I wedged into…
March 12, 2025
“In Bad Faith”
The DC Court that heard the defaation case brought by climate scientist Michael Mann against two bloggers has ruled today that Mann and his lawyers acted in “bad faith” during the case, by presenting false claims on multiple occasions related to Mann’s grant funding: Here, the Court finds, by clear and convincing evidence, that Dr. Mann, through…
March 12, 2025
How To Get Rid of a Tenured Professor
I was a tenured full professor at the University of Colorado Boulder for almost 24 years. At the end of 2024, I left. Officially, it was a voluntary departure. But I sure felt like I’d been pushed out. My story started in 2015, when Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D–Ariz.) asked the university to investigate me. He alleged that…